Absolutely ripping performance by Gang of Four in their early, jagged & confrontational form! Live in Zagreb in 1981!

Gang of Four are an English post-punk group from Leeds. [1] Original personnel were singer Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, bass guitarist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham. They were fully active from 1977 to 1983, and then re-emerged twice in the 1990s with King and Gill. Between 2004 and 2006 the original line-up was reunited; as of 2013, Gill is the sole original member.[2]

The band plays a stripped-down mix of punk rock, funk and dub, with an emphasis on the social and political ills of society. Gang of Four are widely considered one of the leading bands of the late 1970s/early 1980s post-punk movement. Their later albums (Songs of the Free and Hard) found them softening some of their more jarring qualities, and drifting towards dance-punk and disco. Their debut album, Entertainment!, ranked at Number 483 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and is listed by Pitchfork Media as the 8th best album of the 1970s.[3] David Fricke of Rolling Stone described Gang of Four as "probably the best politically motivated band in rock & roll."

A 1969 animated show based on Hot Wheels toys, controversial for essentially being a long commercial sponsored by Mattel

Hot Wheels was a thirty-minute Saturday morning animated television series broadcast on ABC from 1969 to 1971, under the primary sponsorship of Mattel Toys.

Some time during the show's broadcast, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received complaints from toy companies who argued that it was actually a thirty-minute commercial for the toys; one of them was Topper, a rival to Mattel.[1]The FCC obliged by ordering stations to log part of the airings as advertising time.

The landmark work of time-lapse footage that was very influential for KOYAANISQATSI, looks at NYC over the course 15 years!

Before KOYAANISQATSI, there was ORGANISM. Hilary Harris actually contributed some of his innovative time-lapse footage to Godfrey Reggio’s art-house blockbuster but his ORGANISM remains a singular achievement. Shot over the course of fifteen years, the film deepens its splendid visual investigations of how New York works by likening the city’s complex systems to those of a single biological organism. Harris is hardly the first to suggest this metaphor but it registers with fresh life in his canny montage: the flickering lights of the skyline at night correspond with descriptions of neurons firing and the flow of traffic is brilliantly juxtaposed with the microscopic movement of blood cells. Within the time-lapse frame, Harris carefully engineers continuous zooms and layers the composition so as to realize several concurrent elements of circulation. Time itself registers in many guises here: the routinized movements of a cafeteria at lunch, the precise intervals of planes touching down at LaGuardia and the long haul of a construction site. The wondrous view may be technologically enhanced but ORGANISM is unmistakably cinema with a human touch. - Max Goldberg

details a 5-year period during which the dare-devil raised a million dollars, erected a 10-storey take-off ramp and built a rocket-powered car.

In the early 1600s, Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes gave the world the character of Don Quixote, and forevermore, the rest of us had a ready thumbnail sketch of to describe people who become obsessed with a dream that makes the rest of us want to say “...um, but that’s a windmill, dude...” And this will also easily serve as an introduction to Ken Carter, the man who would jump the St. Lawrence River.

Born Kenneth Gordon Polsjek – sometime in 1938 – in the working class slums of Montreal, Ken quit school after only the 4th grade in order to work. He became interested in stunt driving and when he turned 16, he joined a team of touring daredevils. Eventually Ken struck out on his own and established himself as a performer so daring, he was dubbed “The Mad Canadian.”

Watching this documentary video one can see why. This is a special style of stunt driving, in which the object seems to be not so much to actually jump the line of cars, as it is to make an impressive crash when you come down right into one - usually at speeds of 50 mph or more. In this bastard brother to demolition derbies, rocket cars and funny-car theatrics, the impact is the thing. Walking away from the wreck is nice too, but it’s no surprise, and only a small setback, when that doesn’t happen. Sprained ankle? No worries, he’ll be back tomorrow, folks.

The documentary focuses on the five years, between 1976 and 1980, when Ken Carter wanted to pull off the greatest stunt-jump ever: taking a rocket-propelled car and jumping it for a mile over the St. Lawrence River Seaway. To hear Ken describe it is a marvel of understatement as he acknowledges that overshooting the landing spot and crashing into the trees behind “could be a problem.” You know, tree-limb-through-the-chest sort of problem. It is a story of high hopes, a man with an unbeatable spirit, setbacks, setbacks and setbacks. In the face of all of it, Carter maintains a composed and optimistic front, even as everything goes wrong and then goes wrong again.

To hear Ken talk is to watch someone totally committed to their dream. He is honest about his disinterest in making successful jumps. No, he wants to give the crowd a good crash for their money. In one scene, he expresses his confusion and dismay over why anyone would want to do something as stupid as going over Niagara falls in a barrel. That makes no sense to our Ken.

Narrated by the sonorous phrasings of fellow Canadian Gordon Pinsent, the documentary follows the struggles and ultimate failure of trying to bring this stunt to life. It would be accurate to call the whole enterprise Sisyphean, as sadly, the stone of building a ramp some 1400 feet long and 85 feet high and building a rocket car capable of the feat, is never successfully rolled up the proverbial hill.

We meet many of the giants of this world as Ken Carter brings in experts like Dick Keller (maker of the Blue Flame – the rocket car that established a 1970 world record for attaining a speed of 640 mph) to help build the car, or “funny car” star driver Lew Arrington to teach the neophyte Carter how to drive a rocket car. In a wonderful scene of “Well, let’s see if I can do it!” optimism, Ken tries out Lew’s rocket car “Captain America” and goes 260 mph. Previous to this Ken had never driven over 90 mph. The minor wry humor of the description “funny car” (which really means “human missile on wheels”) is trumped by the sight, first of Ken trying work his 6’, 200 lb frame in to Lew’s 5’10” 160 lb sized safety suit, and then of him trying to leverage said large frame into the car which was custom-built to Lew’s size. Still, nothing stops the Ken and he performs just fine.

In fact, no matter what the snafus, obstacles and bad luck storms that fall his way this punishing regularity, Ken Carter maintains a “We’re gonna do this!” sense of optimistic determination, even as jump after jump is canceled, financial backers come on board and then withdraw, and even as the weather never seems to give him a break.In a particularly difficult passage we see Ken being questioned by Evel Knievel – who was sent to investigate by a nervous ABC which had sunk $250,000 into the project. A clearly unimpressed (maybe jealous) Knievel can’t find enough things wrong as he speaks in a monotone while stepping all over Carter’s dream. Jeez, Evel, just because Snake River Canyon didn’t work out for you, you gotta be all down on someone else’s vision?

Carter never gives up, although his later interviews attain a weird vibe as he talks about the relationship between Kenneth Gordon Polsjek – who does the fundraising, the booking and all things business – and Ken carter who loves to drive and crash cars. Maybe we’re seeing the beginnings of personality fracture, or maybe he always kept the two apart, just as Vince Furnier and Alice Cooper did in their career relationship.

I won’t give away the ending, although – to bring us back around to Don Quixote – the documentary reminds me of another windmill-tilting effort, that being Terry Gilliam’s effort to bring The Man of LaMancha to the screen, experiencing similar problems and eventual... well, maybe you should watch the movie. Maybe you should watch both movies.

The biggest lessons to find in the 1 hour, 42 minute film are that you can’t kill a dream when there is still one man who will not disbelieve it could happen; and that life is as much of an adventure as you choose to make it. To quote another driver “My momma said if life is boring, then risk it.” And for Ken Carter, like Don Quixote, life was never boring and the dream remained worth it, every step of the way.

Bio:

Ryk McIntyre is a Multi-Hyphen sort of person. Poet, critic, performer, workshop facilitator and co-host at both GotPoetry! Live (Providence) and Cantab Lounge (Cambridge,MA). He's been living in RI for the past 6 years, with his wife and daughter. Ryk has performed his work at Boston's ICA, NYC's New School, Portsmouth, NH's Music Hall and Lollapalooza, to name just a few. He has toured the US, performing in countless Poetry open mics and festivals. He turned down Allen Ginsburg once.

This is an ecological fable about the evils of industrial pollution. A novelization of the film, written by Seltzer as well, was also published, with the tagline "A Novel of Unrelenting Terror".

Filmed in British Columbia, Canada in 1978, this film marked the beginning of "Hollywood North", the major start to the development of a massive film production business in Vancouver and other areas within of the province. Since then, hundreds of "American" movies have been filmed in the Canadian province.

Some violence/gore and other scenes were deleted not because of the censors but on a decision made by John Frankenheimer. This included a longer close-up of a man's headless corpse and a shot of Katahdin graphically disemboweling Isley (both deemed "gratuitous"), a flashback to the night where Rob and Maggie have sex (deleted for time), and extensions of several scenes, including a longer tour of the paper mill and Rob fishing, which showed him falling asleep and later waking up in the sun.

The original concept for Katahdin was considerably more terrifying than what would eventually show up on screen. However, when director John Frankenheimer saw the concept, he suggested that it should be altered to look more "bear-like". Interestingly, the original concept was actually quite close to the poster art.

Frankenheimer considered Prophecy a film with far more potential than what he eventually delivered, ostensibly due to the high peak of his alcoholism. The scene where Katahdin swats the boy in the sleeping bag to smithereens is regarded as unintentionally hilarious by many viewers in this attack scene.